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This strange and alluring two-hander was first performed in this theatre’s smaller studio space two years ago. It is a dark romance between two women, one in a long-term relationship with a man and the other experimenting with women. Both are tormented, in different ways.
Nadi Kemp-Sayfi returns as Ivy while the abundantly talented Francesca Amewudah-Rivers takes the role of Ash. She is taut, sexy and disturbed. The play sits in and around Amewudah-Rivers, such a phenomenal presence that she eclipses everything else.
She wrings out every last drop of poetry from Eleanor Tindall’s script, whose drama you could call a queer romance, a haunted house story or a horror. It is all of these things, twisting and springing surprises, glinting with dangerous promise, not all of which is realised. That is frustrating but it is a gripping ride nonetheless.
The back wall on Alys Whitehead’s set is a patterned sheet which ripples and rumbles with the unexplained “noise” in Ash’s flat (fabulously antsy sound design by Ellie Isherwood). The home seems possessed by something undefined, and the sheet is reminiscent of the shade in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
Just as that short story has a controlling husband, there is an abusive male character here in Ash’s ex-fiance Cas, although Ivy’s boyfriend, Max, increasingly displays coercively controlling behaviour too, which he attempts to pass off as reasonable and caring.
The hauntings in Tender could be a manifestation of male terror, inflicted on women who pay the price in deteriorating mental health. But the metaphors are too abounding – the eating of flesh, the cutting of it too – and even though the surrealism is exciting, it does not quite add up. The blood on stage suggests violence and you begin to suspect one character might be locked in some kind of afterlife, although this goes against the logic of the central romance.
The strange phenomena in Ash’s flat amount to nothing – the wallpaper is stripped with no reveal beyond. Does it stand for mental collapse? Or coming out? The flaw here is the confusion in potentially clashing meanings. The violence in Ash’s past is strangely under-explained as well, although Cas’s stalking of her feels real.
Yet there are elements to this play that are so powerful that the loose ends do not frustrate quite as much as they might. In a production directed by Emily Aboud, the movement is almost like dance in moments of sexual passion, and there is some lovely lyricism in the characters’ dual narration.
Sometimes tender, it is also as slippery and visceral as raw meat. At 90 minutes it is a meal, not quite filling enough but every morsel delicious.
